Summer 2016 | The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis

First published in 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Edited, designed and produced by Nic Bayley, Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz, Val Parks, Barry Watt and Robert Weiss.

Sitegeist is once again available in print form and can be purchased HERE.

Editorial

This issue of Sitegeist is dedicated, with a mixture of sadness, gratitude and admiration, to the memory of our friend and colleague Kirsty Hall, who died in May of 2015. Kirsty once mentioned that the word ‘bereavement’ derives from the reevers, medieval raiders who terrorized her native Northumberland. Her death has robbed us of a...

When Acts Speak Louder Than Words: On Lacan’s Theory of Action in Psychoanalytic Practice

1 ((Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at Dublin School of Arts, State University of New York—Buffalo, Fordham University, Creighton University School of Medicine, and Mission Mental Health— San Francisco CA. I am grateful to all the participants in these seminars, and especially to Rik Loose, Dan Collins, Ed Robins,)) In the first section...

Transference Anxiety and the Failure of Our Fathers

I have always shrunk from the act of beginning, from the first word, the first touch. The restlessness when the first sentence has to be formed, and after the first, the second. This is the opening sentence of an award-winning novel by the Flemish writer Erwin Mortier. The English title is While the Gods Were...

Between a Rock and the Deep Blue Sea: Kafka’s Angst—and Ours

1 “The great swimmer! The great swimmer!” the people shouted. I was coming from the Olympic Games in X, where I had just set a world record in swimming. I stood on the stairs at the train station in my hometown – where is it? – and looked out at the indistinct crowd in the...

Anxiety as Authenticity in the Face of Our Being-Towards-Death

...Anxiety in the face of death is anxiety ‘in the face of ’ that Potentiality-for-Being which is one’s ownmost, non-relational, and not to be outstripped. That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world itself…Anxiety in the face of death must not be confused with fear in the face of one’s demise. This...

Introduction to Anne-Lise Stern: ‘Be Deported…. and Bear Witness!’ A new translation by Dorothée Bonnigal–Katz

The genesis of this translation lies in the seminars I taught on the Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis training in 2012 on the topic of trauma. I was clear that I could not leave uncovered the Shoah or Holocaust, partly simply because of its insistence in the modern world, and also because I have worked with...

Be Deported…and Bear Witness! Psychoanalysing, Bearing Witness: A Double Bind?

Be Deported...and Bear Witness! ((This presentation was given in November 1996, in the context of a colloquium on the Shoah organised by Annette Wieviorka, Claude Mouchard and Hélène Mouchard-Zay. Hélène Mouchard-Zay is the daughter of Jean Zay, the Minister of National Education who was murdered in 1944 by members of the Vichy Milice. She heads...

Review: Doctors Dissected. Jane Haynes and Martin Scurr, London, Quartet Books. 2015 ISBN 9780704374058

This is a book about closed worlds, and a glimpse into them. The dissecting knife of the title is wielded elegantly and incisively by Jane Haynes, using her professional skill as a psychotherapist to get under the skin of her subjects, to find out what lies beneath that persona of doctor. I was invited to...

Review: Seductions and Enigmas: Laplanche, Theory, Culture, edited by John Fletcher and Nicholas Ray, Laurence and Wishart: London, 2014, 365 pp., ISBN: 978 1 909831 08 7

Since the first English translation of his work, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, in 1976, the influence of Jean Laplanche has steadily increased among Anglophone psychoanalysts and scholars. Until that point he was best known for the critical dictionary of psychoanalysis he co-wrote with Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, which offered an analysis of...

Bodily Identifications: Mona Hatoum at Tate Modern, London, 4 May–21 August 2016

In 2012 I went with Kirsty Hall to the Louise Bourgeois exhibition at the Freud Museum. We had a long and (characteristically for Kirsty) diverse, wide-ranging and allusive conversation afterwards (in Giraffe, surrounded by incredibly noisy children) and then Kirsty wrote her review (Sitegeist No. 8). I was reminded of this enjoyable way of thinking...

Notes on Contributors

Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst and a translator. She is a member of the SITE for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the founder of the Psychosis Therapy Project. She translates for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis on a regular basis. Her translation of Dominique Scarfone’s The Unpast: The Actual Unconscious was recently published by The Unconscious in...

Call for Writing

Sitegeist was founded with the intention of promoting varied, lively and creative approaches in writing to the questions of psychoanalysis today. Our next issue, number 13, will be on the subject of gender and transgender and will consist of papers from our forthcoming Conference. Abstracts and ideas for reviews are very welcome and should be...